Text | Cycads, Cheelia
Since cooperating with OpenAI and fully integrating GPT-4 into various business lines, Microsoft is fully open on the road of AI, and even in the field of search engines, it is expected to challenge Google's dominance.
This May, the AI competition between Microsoft and Google gradually intensified, taking turns to launch new products, new technologies, and new applications.
But at present, Google's "soldier under the city" crisis is more serious, and the situation is more passive.
Microsoft can open "plugins", Google can too, and find OpenAI's counterpart:
Anthropic, an AI startup founded by former OpenAI executives and "backed by" Google, is OpenAI's biggest competitor in AI. Recently, the company announced that it has received its latest round of financing of $450 million, which includes strong support from Google.
Before that, Google had invested $300 million in the company, acquiring a 10% stake.
Google props up OpenAI competitors
Anthropic's financing was soft.
According to PitchBook, Anthropic's financing is the largest round of AI financing this year after Microsoft invested tens of billions of dollars in OpenAI.
With this round of funding, Anthropic raised $1.45 billion, making it the richest AI startup outside of OpenAI ($11.3 billion).
This isn't the first time Google has invested in Anthropic.
Earlier, shortly after Microsoft announced its high-profile $10 billion investment in OpenAI, Google invested about $300 million in Anthropic in exchange for a 10% stake in the company. Under the terms of the deal, Anthropic wants Google Cloud as its preferred cloud service provider.
The deal is strategic and has market implications for both parties.
For Anthropic, Google provides a robust and flexible cloud computing infrastructure, as well as rich and diverse data sources, which are necessary to develop high-performance AI systems.
For Google, Anthropic offers cutting-edge and innovative AI research and development services, as well as products and services that prioritize security.
All of this can help Google improve its ability to compete with competitors (such as Microsoft) in the cloud computing market and strengthen its advantage in the field of AI with other leaders (such as OpenAI).
This collaboration is the same as that of Microsoft and OpenAI.
Not only that, Anthropic's Claude has also become ChatGPT's strongest competitor, and is the next generation of AI assistants built by Anthropic based on its research results.
On March 15 of this year, Claude was officially launched, accessible in the developer console via a chat interface and API, and capable of performing a variety of conversational and text-processing tasks such as summarizing, searching, creative and collaborative writing, Q&A, coding, and more.
On May 15, Anthropic announced that it had expanded Claude's context window from 9,000 tokens to 100,000 tokens, meaning that Claude can "read" a large amount of information and give feedback in a very short time.
For comparison, OpenAI's GPT-4 context window is 32,000 tokens.
At the same time, Anthropic believes that Claude can "reduce the potential for harmful output", "be easier to talk to," and "be easier to manipulate."
Claude has been used and proven in various industries. Some of Anthropic's partners include personal assistant software Notion, Quora and search engine DuckDuckGo.
It is worth mentioning that some people think that Google will not necessarily integrate Claude into its services compared to Microsoft, because Google already has Bard and PaLM. For Google, funding OpenAI's competitors may be more in Google's strategic interest.
In particular, Anthropic's founding team came from OpenAI.
Founded by OpenAI executives who left the company, it also holds high the banner of general AI
Microsoft's involvement in OpenAI was actually the direct trigger for the establishment of Anthropic -
Dissatisfied with their old club becoming a vassal of Microsoft, 11 former OpenAI employees left in anger.
Anthropic's founders are primarily Daniela Amodei and Dario Amodei, the latter serving as vice president of research at OpenAI.
The Amodei siblings left OpenAI due to differences in the company's development direction and philosophy, especially regarding OpenAI's joint venture with Microsoft in 2019.
Among the 11 people who left was Tom Brown, chief engineer of GPT-3, who heralded the era of large models in AI.
Founded in 2021, Anthropic describes itself as an AI security company with a public interest (PBC), announcing $124 million in funding since its inception.
The emphasis on "public welfare" is aimed at the old club OpenAI.
In previous years, Microsoft frequently injected money into OpenAI, and then asked them to use Azure supercomputing for research, licensed the technology to Microsoft, and even raised funds for Microsoft's own investment activities.
This is contrary to the original intention of OpenAI, and a group of employees thought of leaving to start a business. However, in addition to being dissatisfied with OpenAI's gradual reduction to Microsoft's "subordinates", these people also have their own ambitions.
Although OpenAI has created a large language model like GPT-3, the working principle behind this model cannot be summarized in a few words, and everyone's impression of it is only a larger number of parameters and more data.
In contrast, a group of OpenAI employees want to do controllable, explainable AI.
So, after the company was founded, Anthropic said that today's large, general-purpose systems can bring significant benefits, but can also be unpredictable, unreliable and opaque: Anthropic aims to make progress on these issues. The company's research interests span a variety of areas, including natural language, human feedback, the law of scaling, reinforcement learning, code generation, and interpretability.
Head financing
Last week, a total of 20 investment and financing events occurred in the domestic biomedicine and artificial intelligence fields. There were 10 cases of artificial intelligence, with a total financing amount of more than 298 million yuan, and 10 cases of biomedical treatment, with a total financing amount of more than 410 million yuan.
Last week, angels had more Series A financing. The field of biomedicine involves mRNA drugs, macromolecule drugs, etc., and the field of artificial intelligence includes robots.
The biggest fundraisers last week were Microbio and Biogenes.
Among them, Simicrobial is a platform-based innovative pharmaceutical company that carries out mRNA innovative vaccine R&D and production and nanoliposome package delivery technology services; Weijie Biotech is a high-end animal protein drug developer.
The most financed in the field of artificial intelligence are Nuolei Technology and Luchen Technology.
Nuolei Technology is an edge artificial intelligence chip developer, and Luchen Technology is a high-performance computing solution provider.
Weekly Financing Summary:
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Reference Articles:
1, the home of US stocks - "Google-invested artificial intelligence company: Claude developer Anthropic"
2, qubits - "ChatGPT vs Claude, the chatbot war has begun"
3. Pinplay - "OpenAI's strongest opponent raised another $450 million|Large model financing tracking"
4, Geek Park - "Financing is soft, valuation exceeds $4 billion, this company has become OpenAI's biggest rival"
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